A check against last year’s count and some clarification has resulted in recognizing that 1,055 journals don’t need to be rechecked, leaving 2,460 that will be rechecked starting in a few days.
The 1,055 include 251 that ceased no later than 2020; 183 removed by DOAJ from its database; nine that either aren’t journals at all or can’t be counted as such; and the two “repeat offenders” categories: 79 that were unreachable or unworkable both last year and this, and 533 that showed signs of malware or were otherwise dangerous both last year and this.
Of the remaining 2,460, many are either journals that hadn’t published any year-2024 issues when first checked or (about 550) had published some issues but in a pattern that suggested more 2024 issues were on the way. Others are journals with what are probably transitory problems–for example, 26 marked as being in maintenance, around 50 with apparently-temporary error codes.
There are 442 cases of malicious behavior (expanded to include not only malware but certificate problems that can expose a visitor to malware) and 830 journals that were unreachable or unworkable (including most of the transitory problems. And then…well, there are close to five dozen “really bad HTML” cases: mostly journals where the home page is obscured by dark gray and won’t accept any commands, at least when tested in Chrome (which I use for the scan because of the fast/easy autotranslate). I feel it would be perfectly appropriate to say these are incompetent and shouldn’t be counted, but I’ll give them another try (using Edge or Firefox).
Oh, there are also 119 404 errors at the journal level, 14 where the journal blocked me from reaching it, more than 250 timeouts, and other miscellaneous problems. They’ll all be retested.
So how will it turn out? We shall see…in two or three weeks.
